A project at the University of California Berkeley's School of Journalism rethinks the look and feel of the staid black and white label, and although some of the proposed designs are not part of the FDA's official effort to redesign food packages, they're spurring new ideas and approaches in the project, reports New York Times's Well blog.

"Rethink the Food Label" Project Designs

Lily Mihalik, co-creator of the project, said there was "a lot of things right with the current label, but at the same time, people are confused. The question is whether a new nutrition facts label could help people make more educated decisions."

The winning entry came from San Francisco visual designer Renee Walker, who used colorful boxes to depict the relative proportion of ingredients in a product.

One of judges, food writer Michael Pollan, said he "liked being able to see the visual breakdown of foods, although I wonder how her design would work with more complicated products, like Lucky Charms, say, or a PowerBar... What I'd like to see next is some sort of color coding for the food groups and some attempt to show the degree of processing of various foods. Eating doesn't have to be complicated; figuring out what's in your food shouldn't be either."

To view the winning design, and the other entries in the project, click here.